Juho Leinonen

The key question that my research seeks to answer is how to best support and engage diverse learner populations with educational technology and artificial intelligence. My research tackles this challenge in three intertwined ways: 1) by developing deeper insights into students’ learning through fine-grained learning analytics; 2) by utilizing educational technology, artificial intelligence, and large language models to support both students and teachers; and 3) by leveraging learnersourcing to create ample learning opportunities tailored to distinct student needs.

Full researcher profile

https://research.aalto.fi/...

juho.2.leinonen@aalto.fi

Areas of expertise

113 Computer and information sciences, 516 Educational sciences, Software engineering, operating systems, man-computer interaction

Honors and awards

Best Research Paper of 2025 Award at the GenAI in CS Education Workshop: Practice and Research (AICSEPAR) 2026

Best Research Paper of 2025 Award at the GenAI in CS Education Workshop: Practice and Research (AICSEPAR) 2026 for "Probing the Unknown: Exploring Student Interactions with Probeable Problems at Scale in Introductory Programming": https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3724363.3729093

Award or honor granted for a specific work Department of Computer Science Mar 2026

Aalto Pioneering Excellence Honorable Mention

Aalto Pioneering Excellence Honorable Mention was awarded to the Programming Education Team of the Computer Science department of the School of Science

Award or honor granted for a specific work Department of Computer Science Nov 2025

ACE2024 Best Paper Award

Best paper award for "Evaluating LLM-generated Worked Examples in an Introductory Programming Course": https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3636243.3636252

Award or honor granted for a specific work Department of Computer Science Jan 2024

UKICER 2023 Best Paper Award

For "Exploring the Interplay of Achievement Goals, Self-Efficacy, Prior Experience and Course Achievement"

Award or honor granted for a specific work Computer Science Lecturers Sep 2023

The best practitioner paper at the 25th Australasian Computing Education Conference, ACE 2023

Award or honor granted for a specific work Department of Computer Science Jan 2023

ICER 2022 Best Paper Award for Article "Automatic Generation of Programming Exercises and Code Explanations Using Large Language Models"

Award or honor granted for a specific work Computer Science Lecturers Jan 2022

SIGCSE TS 2022 Best Paper Computing Education Research

For "Time-on-Task Metrics for Predicting Performance"

Award or honor granted for a specific work Department of Computer Science Mar 2022

Best Paper Award at the 23rd Australasian Computing Education Conference, ACE2021

Best Paper Award at the 23rd Australasian Computing Education Conference (ACE2021) for the paper "Exploring the Effects of Contextualized Problem Descriptions on Problem Solving”.

Award or honor granted for a specific work Department of Computer Science Feb 2021

Research groups

Computer Science Professors, Assistant Professor
Professorship Leinonen Juho, Assistant Professor
Computer Science RA - Computing Education Research, Assistant Professor

Publications

ACM Generative AI Task Force Special Session : Teaching with Generative AI: Tools You Can Use Today

Paul Denny, Juho Leinonen, Viraj Kumar, Steven Gordon 2026

Assessing the Quality and Diversity of Student- and AI-Generated Programming Exercises from Limited Examples : Empirical Insights from a Large-Scale Blind Evaluation

Paul Denny, Juho Leinonen, Arto Hellas, Sami Sarsa, Michael Liut, Hassan Khosravi 2026 WCCCE 2026 - Proceedings of the 28th Western Canadian Conference on Computing Education

Enabling Postgraduate Projects in Computing Education through Synthetic Research Data Generation

Paul Denny, Kaitlin Riegel, Andrew Luxton-Reilly, Juho Leinonen, James Prather, Stephen MacNeil 2026 ACE 2026 - Proceedings of the 28th Australasian Computing Education Conference

The Impact of Generative AI on the Perpetuation and Detection of Greenwashing in Sustainability Reports : Insights From an Experiment

Ruth Dimes, Charl de Villiers, Paul Denny, Juho Leinonen 2026 Business Strategy and the Environment

Effective Use of Large Language Models for Social Constructivism in Computer Science Education

Nickolas Falkner, Leo Leppänen, Juho Leinonen 2026 ITiCSE 2026 - Proceedings of the 31st ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 1

Beyond Surface Human-Likeness: AI-Mentor Feedback Alignment, Pedagogical Adaptation, and Student Engagement in Longitudinal Learning Data

Jing Fan, Jiseon Kim, Kimia Abedini, Daniel Koch-Truhponen, Charles Koutcheme, Juho Leinonen 2026 CEUR Workshop Proceedings

Fast and Forgettable : A Controlled Study of Novices' Performance, Learning, Workload, and Emotion in AI-Assisted and Human Pair Programming Paradigms

Nicholas Gardella, James Prather, Juho Leinonen, Paul Denny, Raymond Pettit, Sara L. Riggs 2026 ICER '26: Proceedings of the 2026 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research Vol. 1